What time of day should I write?

Jeffrey's answer

I write four two-hour shifts a day. Six in the morning until eight. Ten until noon. Two until four. Six until eight in the evening. That is the structure that has produced thirty novels and three hundred million sales over fifty years, and I do not propose to change it now.

Just those first two hours alone — six in the morning until eight, day in, day out — are seven hundred hours a year. Then I do another two from ten until noon. Another two from two until four. And another from six until eight. I am not serving in a shop. I am not an accountant. I am not a Member of Parliament. I am a writer. You have to treat the work with the respect it deserves. If a writer is going to come on to the running track and fight me, those are the hours I am putting in. Match them or be beaten.

Why four shifts of two hours, rather than one long sitting? Because the human mind does not write well for more than two hours at a stretch. After two hours you are forcing the prose, and forced prose is the kind of prose that has to be cut on the third draft anyway. Better to write fresh for two hours, walk for half an hour, read or eat or live a little, and then come back fresh for the next two. Four times in a day, with discipline, gives me sixteen pages of new draft. In a six-day week, that is ninety-six pages. In two months, that is the first draft of a novel.

Why six in the morning? Because the world is quiet, and so am I. The mind first thing in the morning has not yet been infected by the day’s small calamities. Ideas arrive there that will not arrive at three in the afternoon. P.D. James, who I knew well, used to say the same thing. Anthony Trollope wrote at five for forty years. Hemingway wrote at first light. The early morning is the writer’s protected hour.

Now — what time should you write? That depends on your life, not mine. If you have small children and a job, the early morning may be the only time the house is quiet. If you have insomnia, eleven at night may be when the book lives. If you are a teacher with summers off, the structure changes again. The hours do not matter. The discipline does.

Pick your hours. Defend them. Do not let small fires burn through them. The writer who writes from six to eight every morning for a year has a novel. The writer who writes when they have time has a notebook full of beginnings. The difference is not talent. It is the calendar.

Turn the hourglass. Begin.

A few practical notes

• Most writers do their best work in the first 2 hours after waking. Cognitive science backs this — willpower and creative function are highest before the day’s small frictions accumulate.
• Early morning (5–8am) suits writers with families or day jobs. The house is quiet, the phone is silent. The cost is the early alarm, but it’s the most protected hour most adults have.
• Evening (9–11pm) suits writers with insomnia or night-owl rhythms. Less common but valid. Toni Morrison wrote pre-dawn AND late at night.
• Avoid mid-afternoon (2–4pm). The ‘post-lunch dip’ is real. Use it for admin, research, reading — not first-draft writing.
• Don’t write into the small hours. Sleep deprivation kills prose. The 2am pages always need rewriting.

Match your writing rhythm to your natural rhythm. Some people genuinely peak at 11am. Others at 9pm. The hour matters less than the consistency.